Another "What's the best distro for my laptop" thread

[happysmileman]

Sorry for making another one of these, but I'm just wondering what would be best distro for my laptop. It's a Dell Inspiron 1000 and Specs are:

224MB RAM (Yeah that's not a mistake, maybe it's partially broken or something?)
30GB HDD.
Mobile Celeron 2.2Ghz processor.

AFAIK that's all that's really relevant since everything else in it seems to be just cheap generic equipment.

I'd like a KDE distro if any would run at any decent speed, sicne I might use it for programming KDE/QT programs and stuff, but realise thaqt 224MB RAM isn't that great for KDE or GNOME and I might end up using XFCE/Fluxbox or something.

I don't mind difficulty or anything, I've used Gentoo before for a while and didn't dislike it much, but I've just tried Gentoo and messed up the install, and I don't feel like installing it again since I'm not even sure HOW I messed up the install and would possibly just repeat my mistake.

[Lord Illidan]

Strange RAM amount - 128 Mb + 96...if you upgrade it, Arch Linux would be a good contender, imho

[ryazkhan]

I think you should be fine with any distributions out there. Your Laptop meet the requirement for ubuntu. You can try Desktop edition because that is GUI and more user friendly too. It is very easy to configure and use and you have most of things avialable right after installation so unlike window you dont have to buy seprate softwares :) Open office is great example for that. Good Luck!

[happysmileman]

Strange RAM amount - 128 Mb + 96...if you upgrade it, Arch Linux would be a good contender, imho

It'd be awkward for me to upgrade it since I live so far away from anywhere that'd do that kinda stuff (several hour drive), I was thinking Arch myself though, just not sure if it'd be able to run KDE with my RAM

I think you should be fine with any distributions out there. Your Laptop meet the requirement for ubuntu. You can try Desktop edition because that is GUI and more user friendly too. It is very easy to configure and use and you have most of things avialable right after installation so unlike window you dont have to buy seprate softwares Open office is great example for that. Good Luck!

Was thinking that, suppose I could always just try Kubuntu, since I have LiveCD lying around anyway. I've seen that KDE4 is supposed to be even lighter on RAM so that'd be good, but I won't be installing it until 8.04 since I don't like making changes that large to my Kubuntu install (It always seems to pollute the install with both KDE3 and KDE4 programs in menus and stuff)


Edit: Wikipedia says that Ubuntu Desktop version needs 384MB RAM to run? And my Kubuntu LiveCD cover says that LiveCD needs 384MB RAM to run? Does this mean that I can't run LiveCD with my requirements, or can't run Ubuntu at all.
Either way i'm thinking it'd be very sluggish

[marquee moon]

Xubuntu will run fine on that memmory( I think).

If you wanted to save a little more memory, you could install xubuntu, get that up and running, then install E-17 and uninstall X-fce. (different desktop environments: E17 is very light on memory resources, but still provides a good user interface)

I've noticed my standard ubuntu installation (on my laptop)runs at 190Mb with no packages open. With Firefox open, its around 205, and with Firfox and Open Office, its 215Mb. If you take some memory off that for running xubuntu, then a bit more if you got down to E17, and you should be safe.

It may be sluggish to install, but hang in there.

I'm not sure about running live, I think you need lots of RAM.

The advantage of ubuntu & its offspring over other distos at the moment (imo) is the ease of installing & uninstalling a huge variety of programs- synaptic package manager is just fantastic.


If those dont work & your looking for a very memory efficient alternative, consider "Puppy". Its a tiny OS which is very easy to install, comes with a massive amount of software and (on my 6 yr old desktop) it recognises all sorts of windows hardware that even windows had problems with. It configures devices very, very effectively.
Personally, I'm not so keen on the large cartoon-like icons, and the file manager is not as good as unbuntu. But these are both small things. In general, puppy is definitely worth a look.

[happysmileman]

Well right now I'm installing Kubuntu, will probably at some point run a "apt-get install xubuntu-desktop" or whatever as well, but as I've said before I'd like to have KDE available for programming and stuff.
And yeah it's taking ages to install, but it's not as RAM hungry as I would've thought while installing, seems about 260-270MB consistently, sicne I already had a swap partition on here it's ok.

Installing stuff will be a bitch I assume, but I can always just use XFCE when I'm not doing anything KDE specific.

[wolfen69]

i would suggest xubuntu. kde might be too much for 224ram.

[DerlinStiles]

This isn't exactly related, but you might be interested...

I have a Celeron 600 w/256 RAM

I just installed Ubuntu on it and from login to desktop took 1m 07s. Opening apps was painfully slow. I'm assuming this would be akin to speed in KDE environment.

I did a complete reinstall with Xubuntu and now it only takes 38s from login to desktop. And now apps aren't painfully slow to open - just slow ;)

[Antman]

i would suggest xubuntu. kde might be too much for 224ram.

+1 for Xubuntu... on your ram amount.

[happysmileman]

This isn't exactly related, but you might be interested...

I have a Celeron 600 w/256 RAM

I just installed Ubuntu on it and from login to desktop took 1m 07s. Opening apps was painfully slow. I'm assuming this would be akin to speed in KDE environment.

I did a complete reinstall with Xubuntu and now it only takes 38s from login to desktop. And now apps aren't painfully slow to open - just slow ;)

I install Kubuntu and it beats that by far, 15secs from login to Desktop, (Though the little loading thingy stays for another 10-15 secs).

And nothing goes that slow, maybe I'm just lucky, and I'll be installing Xubuntu-desktop anyway just in case it starts going slower for some reason I can use XFCE, but right now it seems to be working fine.

[MONODA]

I was thinking Arch myself though, just not sure if it'd be able to run KDE with my RAM arch does not come preinstalled with KDE that is arc linux. check out arch with xfce. wolvix and zenwalk are good if you dont mind compiling somthing every now and then.

[D-EJ915]

I have Debian Etch installed on my 192MB 400MHz old laptop and it works great, so if all else fails, Etch works fine. I have the "desktop" installed too which loads up gdm and all that jazz.

[bashveank]

Fluxbuntu has been a good choice for my old Pentium 3 Thinkpad. You have to do a bit of tidying up with the menus and such, but, other than that, it's a great distro.

[marquee moon]

I've just donloaded TinyMe (http://www.mypclinuxos.com/doku.php/tinyme:home) and I really like it. Very clean, very functional, good file manager. It runs on openbox desktop environment which I quite like.
Very fast, even running live (on a PIII). At under 200Mb, it's very light on memory requirements.

[Twitch6000]

Ok people you make me sooooooooooo upset you forget about the distro that was made for this *goes emo*.
Anyways you should try and use DSL(damn small linux).
Link-http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

[mips]

224MB RAM (Yeah that's not a mistake, maybe it's partially broken or something?)

I'd like a KDE distro if any would run at any decent speed, sicne I might use it for programming KDE/QT programs and stuff, but realise thaqt 224MB RAM isn't that great for KDE or GNOME and I might end up using XFCE/Fluxbox or something.

The 224MB ram is because your gfx card uses 32MB of shared ram. 256-224=32

If you like KDE then I would suggest Arch+KDEmod, http://kdemod.ath.cx/
Only install the kde components you really need. There is also a Kofficemod available.
You will find it pretty fast!